Sean Ongley

Tag: Media

  • Hanging Out with Sam Tripoli

    Hanging Out with Sam Tripoli

    Life has been a truly winding road. There is some sense of validation that the struggles and the ego busting that I’ve been going through over the last year has a purpose. I found myself out of nowhere joining comedian and podcast factory Sam Tripoli for a chat. I had emailed him before, and tweeted with him, but I’m also just one bee in the swarm of many thousand of fans.

    I have been listening to his most successful show Tin Foil Hat Podcast, since 2016. It was easy to talk with him because I know exactly how his patterns and style work. He doesn’t know me but I already relate to him as I would a friend that I’ve spent many hours with. Kind of weird.

    Official Tin Foil Hat Podcast Logo

    Sam’s appearance at Helium Comedy Club was scheduled just before the second lock down in Philadelphia, in between two trips to Michigan visiting my grandfather, who died with Covid while I was there. Knowing I was going back for a funeral, I was dead set on having fun at that comedy show. I did quite a bit of drinking that night.

    The outside meet and greet was cool. I was drunkenly excited and in an emotional place, kind of manic, and I started talking about Scientology. He invited me to his Patreon show on the spot.

    Just over a week later, already back again from the funeral, we were on a video chat. Both of us were prone to meandering, and even though it is was fun, I couldn’t seem to guide the conversation in the direction that I wanted it to go with Scientology.

    I also wanted to reveal my theory as to what happened to my grandfather from PCR testing to hospital treatment conditions. That is kind of a big can of worms that I am reluctant to open up and I’m glad we didn’t.

    We didn’t really get to the Scientology stuff, so he invited me on to Zero, the spirituality show on Rokfin.

    We scheduled the show and I paced my day around the nighttime hour that we planned, but then he changed it all of the sudden when I was just sitting down for dinner. I almost postponed, because I had to eat and then get all of my stuff set up: microphone, stand, laptop, etc. But I got it together and rushed into the meeting.

    We start by talking about Scientology and then we end up going a few directions including the article that was fresh on my mind “The Tool of Predictive Purification,” in which I argue that the rock band Tool is an agent of the alliance to awaken consciousness against the force that seeks to control it.

    The show was good, he repeated off the air that I “crushed it,” thanked me for making it work, but ended up using it for his Patreon again. That was disappointing but I trust it is for the best.

    I never got to see the video for these because I didn’t have a Patreon account and they don’t keep videos over the long term. I support my podcasts in a different way, like going to the comedy shows in a pandemic and using promo codes for CBD. I joined only to grab a screenshot for my post. I was at least able to download the audio.

    If you want to hear the archived audio, you can join Patreon and subscribe to the Tin Foil Hat Podcast and search my name. Or you can listen to them right here (don’t tell Sam). Just click for the first one, and for the second one.

    I never took screenshots or pictures in person, so that is what I got. We might do it again, but nothing has been planned.

    Here are some past posts of mine about Scientology, there is plenty of reading in these three stories.

    Read “Combating Cults with Spiritual Skepticism”

    Read “Going Clear for Real”

    Read “ABC News Scientology Hoax Obscures Belgium Decision”

  • Through Media to the Self

    Through Media to the Self

    Part 1

    The Journalist Errant

    One of the first books I recall reading to educate myself on multimedia was The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshal McLuhan. The author that coined the term “global village” and “hot/cold media” should be every journalist and web programmer’s required reading, to build a clear foundation of what the hell they are doing. In this book, he analyzes Don Quixote as a character, and a story, in the early age of print media.

    The gist of it is, when Quixote set out to become a “knight errant,” he was reaching back to an older time, a time before the printing press when knights ruled the land by unwritten laws, when literacy was wholly uncommon.

    Hilariously written by Miguel de Cervantes, published 1605, Don Quixote is contemporary to the author’s time, and it is a fictional study on the psychological phenomena that trails the advent of major technological advancements in media. When a new medium is introduced, it changes media, and consciousness is affected. 

    I am currently reading both The Adventures of Don Quixote and Understanding Media, by McLuhan.

    Quixote and Pancho riding together. Original painting 1754, Hulton Archive.

    By the extraordinary power of this new form of media (mass-produced books) and its disruptive affect on the senses (oral culture versus literate, auditory versus visual), a regular householder in some village hallucinated himself into a knight and set about for a new life of heroic adventures and chivalry.

    The most famous scene in the book is within the first tenth of its volumes. That is when Quixote is fighting the windmills he has mistaken for giants, against the alarms of his squire, Pancho de la Mancha. Quixote is an older man, probably experiencing dementia, but a specific kind influenced by books. He believes in a world that he never lived in, because he’s become expert to it through books.

    I failed to recognize McLuhan’s lesson about Don Quixote when I engaged in the pursuit of starting an internet-based media corporation.

    The modern medium shift today is electric technology. The evolution of new forms of media resulting from the new medium has been rapid. From signal transmissions by wire, to radio, to cable television, and now fiber-optic internet, we are living in the equivalent stage today as Don Quixote was then, as the whole structure of society is being rewired, pun intended.

    We are changing and we don’t see it changing us until it has already taken a grip over our behavior.

    I reviewed The Gutenberg Galaxy, and the article is archived with the rest of THRU. To have the trail of my work from seed to flower and back to compost is a study of progress itself. The oldest posts there are mine, and very few have been edited since.

    About six years ago, all content original to seanongley.com was transferred, along with my dreams, to a string of sites that would eventually become THRU.media My dreams would be supported, if not complicated, by pursuing the dream of building Thru Media LLC.

    Today, I have personal insight into the media industry and the whole ecosystem that McLuhan saw coming is unfolding rapidly within my generation.

    I’m watching the Quixote effect take people down every day. I would say that my story with THRU is like my own knight errantry, my adventure where I had no calling outside the fire in my heart, no rules except the abstract principles of justice, driven by the affect of a major advancement in electric technology: The Internet.

    My Pancho was Kathleen Dolan. Unlike Quixote, I was in love with my Pancho, and we had a domestic relationship. Rather, she was that and my Dulcinea del Toboso, the subject of Quixote’s devotion and chivalry. As such, I both abused Kate by dragging her along into my adventures, and devoted myself to her, as I believed she was destined to be a great writer and that I was there to bridge the gap from bartender to Author.

    Kate and Myself covering Bernie Sanders rally, 2015, at Moda Center.

    I pulled a special little publication together with some big dreams, worked with other dreamers, and we took it on with a spirited campaign. We held ourselves to a standard that improved the quality of the content over time.

    We came very close to launching a successful company, but as I humbly tell my story, I hope to illustrate that I was trying to stand on the shoulders of giants. But they turned out actually to be windmills.

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